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In Brief Book Club: The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra

A club to explore a collection of short stories from writers new and established!

Join us for March's discussion of The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra.

From the "New York Times" bestselling author of "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" dazzling, poignant, and lyrical interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war, and the redemptive power of art.
This stunning, exquisitely written collection introduces a cast of remarkable characters whose lives intersect in ways both life-affirming and heartbreaking. A 1930s Soviet censor painstakingly corrects offending photographs, deep underneath Leningrad, bewitched by the image of a disgraced prima ballerina. A chorus of women recount their stories and those of their grandmothers, former gulag prisoners who settled their Siberian mining town. Two pairs of brothers share a fierce, protective love. Young men across the former USSR face violence at home and in the military. And great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil landscape unremarkable except for the almost incomprehensibly peaceful past it depicts. In stunning prose, with rich character portraits and a sense of history reverberating into the present, "The Tsar of Love and Techno" is a captivating work from one of our greatest new talents.

[E]xtraordinary Each story is a gem in itself. But the book is greater than its parts, an almost unbearably moving exploration of the importance of love, the pull of family, the uses and misuses of history, and the need to reclaim the past by understanding who you really are and what really happened He starts this miracle of a book by showing us how a system can erase the past, the truth, even its citizens. He ends by demonstrating, through his courageous, flawed, deeply human characters, how individual people can restore the things that have been taken away. And if you ve been worrying that you ve lost your faith in the emotionally transformative power of fiction Mr. Marra will restore that, too.
-Sarah Lyall, "The New York Times"

Remarkable Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration the reappearance, on the page of those whom history has erased.
-Francine Prose, "Washington Post"